Mercedes Lackey - Winds Of Fate

"When the Heartstone fractured," Darkwind finished for him, his voice flat and utterly without expression. I'm not surprised he doesn't remember.

Darkwind had been "Songwind" then, a proud young mage with snow-white hair and a peacock wardrobe-Not Darkwind, who refused to use any magic but shielding, who never wore anything but scout gear and wouldn't use the formidable powers of magic he still could control-if he chose-not even to save himself.

He was-had been-Adept-rank, in fact-and strong enough at nineteen to be one of the Heartstone anchors...Not that it mattered. He watched Vree tear off strips of rabbit and gulp them down, fur and all. "I don't know if you ever knew this," he said conversationally, not wanting Firestorm to think he was upset about the reminder of his past. "I watched the building of the Gate to send them all off." Firestorm tilted his head to one side. "Why did they send everyone off? I wasn't paying any attention-it was my first Vale-move."

"We always do that," Darkwind said, as Vree got down to the bones and began cleaning every scrap of flesh from them he could find. "It's part of the safety measures, sending those not directly involved in moving the power or guarding those who are to the new Vale-site, where they'd be safe in case something happened."

"Which it did." Firestorm sighed. "I guess it's a good thing.. The gods only know where they are now. Somewhere west." Somewhere west. Too far to travel, when over half of them were children.

And not an Adept able to build a Gate back to us in the lot of them." Darkwind scowled. "Now that was a mistake. And it was bad tactics.

Half of the Adepts should have been with them, and I don't know why the Council ordered them all to stay until the Heartstone was drained and the power moved." Firestorm relaxed marginally, and scratched Kreel with his free hand.

"Nobody ever tells us about these things. Darkwind, why haven't we built a new Gate and brought them back?" A damned good question. Darkwind's lips compressed. "Father says that what's left of the Heartstone is too unstable to leave, too dangerous to build a Gate near, and much too dangerous to have children exposed to.

Firestorm raised an eloquent eyebrow. "You don't believe him?"

"I don't know what to believe." Darkwind stared off into the distance, over Firestorm's shoulder, into the shadows beneath the trees. "I probably shouldn't be telling you this, even. That kind of information is only supposed to be discussed by the Council or among mages. There's another thing; Father was acting oddly even before the disaster-he hasn't been quite himself since he was caught in that forest fire. Or that's the way it seems to me, but nobody else seems to have noticed anything wrong."

"Well, I haven't, at least not any more than with the rest of the Council." Firestorm laughed. sarcastically. "Old men, too damned proud to ask for help from outside, and too feeble to fix things themselves.

Which is probably why I'm not on the Council; I've said that in public a few too many times." The scout tossed his hawk up into the air and turned to go. Kreel darted up into the trees ahead, and all the birds went silent as he took to the air. Everything that flew knew the shape of a cooperihawk; nothing on wings was safe from a hungry one. And no bird would ever take a chance on a cooperi being sated. "If you're all right to finish, I'll get back to my section. Do we bother to clean up, or leave it for the scavengers?"

Leave it," Darkwind told him. "Maybe a few bones lying around will discourage others."

"Maybe." The younger man laughed. "Or maybe we should start leaving heads on stakes at the borders." With that macabre suggestion, the scout followed his bird into the forest, moving in silence, blending into the foliage within moments. Vree had finished his rabbit, dropping the polished bones, and Darkwind launched him into the air as well, so that they could resume their interrupted patrol.

He'd meant what he told Firestorm, every bitter word of it. I hardly know Father anymore. He used to be creative, flexible; he used to have no trouble admitting when he was wrong. Now he's the worst of the lot. Every time another Clan sends someone to see if we need help, he sends them away.

How can we not need help? We've got an unstable Heartstone, we don't have enough scouts to patrol a border that we had to pull back in the first Place. Our children are gone and we can't get them back-and we don't dare leave. And he's pretending we can handle it.

That was part of the reason he spent so little time in the Vale anymore; the place was too silent, too empty. Tayledras children were seldom as noisy as Outlander children, but they made their presence-and their absence-felt.

The once-lively Vale seemed dead without them.

And another part of the reason he avoided the Vale was his father.

The fewer opportunities there were for confrontations with the old man, the better Darkwind liked it.

He would have to go in at the end of his patrol, though, and he wrinkled his nose in distaste at what he would have to endure. This invasion would have to be reported. And as always, the Council would want to know why he hadn't handled things differently, why he hadn't blasted the intruders or shot them all when he first saw them. And because he was an Elder, the questions would be more pointed.

I didn't kill them because they could have been perfectly innocent, dammit!

And Starblade would want to know why he hadn't used magic.

And as always, Darkwind would be unable to give him an answer that would satisfy him.

"Because I don't want to" isn't good enough. He wants to know why I don't want to.

Darkwind pulled his climbing-staff out of the sheath, and hooked a limb, hauling himself up into the tree and trying not to wince as he discovered new bruises.

He wants to know why. He says. But he won't accept my reasons because Adept Starblade couldn't possibly have a son who gave up magic for the life of a Scout.

Even when the magic killed his mother in front of his eyes. Even when the magic ruined his life. Even when he's seen. over and over, that magic isn't an answer, it's a tool, and any tool can be done without.

He looked out over the forest floor and briefly touched Vree's mind.

All was quiet. Even the birds, frightened into silence by the noise of the fight and the appearance of the cooperihawk, were singing again.

Well. he'd better start learning to change again, Darkwind decided, because I've had enough. I'm taking this incident to the Council as usual, but this time I'm going to make an issue of it. And I don't care if he doesn't like what he's going to hear; we can't keep on like this indefinitely.

And if he wants a fight, he's going to get one.

Elspeth bit her lip until it bled to keep herself from losing her temper.

Queen Selenay, normally serene in the face of any crisis, had reacted to the attack on her eldest child with atypical hysteria.

Well, I'd call it hysteria, anyway.

Elspeth had barely gotten clean and changed when the summons arrived from her mother-accompanied by a bodyguard of two. As a harbinger of what was to come, that bodyguard put Elspeth's hackles up immediately. The sight of Selenay, standing beside the old wooden desk in her private apartments, white to the lips and with jaws and hands clenched, did nothing to make her daughter feel any better.

And so far, Selenay's impassioned tirade had not reassured her Heir either. It seemed that the Queen's answer to the problem was to restrict Elspeth's movements to the Palace complex, and to assign her a day-and-night guard of not less than two at all times.

And that, as far as Elspeth was concerned, was totally unacceptable.

But she couldn't get a word in until her mother stopped pacing up and down the breadth of her private office and finally calmed down enough to sit and listen instead of talking. It helped that Talia, though she was privy to this not-quite-argument Elspeth was having with Selenay, was staying discreetly in the background, and so far hadn't said a word, one way or the other.